Pejman Yousefzadeh

newyorker:

In today’s Daily Comment, Jeffrey Toobin writes about how the disappearance of Republican presidential candidates from political life in the past couple of decades, aside from John McCain, “reflects a fundamental problem with the contemporary Republican Party.”

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Photograph by Justin Sullivan/Getty.

Actually, it reflects the fact that Bush is still unpopular and that losers of general elections tend to fade away. I didn’t hear much recently about George McGovern until he died, and I don’t tend to hear all that much from Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, or Mike Dukakis. Al Gore is in the news, but that is because he has a new book and because he made a fortune selling his failure of a television station to al Jazeera. John Kerry is in the news but that is because he is the secretary of state, and before that, because he was a sitting senator and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

I recognize that the New Yorker likes writing articles whose underlying premise is “Republicans suck,” but life—and politics—is just a wee bit more complicated than that. Of course, leave it to Jeffrey Toobin to fail to understand that.